August 2012 – Moved to https://blog.jakubholy.net/

Most interesting links of August ’12

Recommended Readings How To Fail With Agile:Twenty Tips to Help You Avoid Success – a great overview of ways people may make agile projects and initiatives fail – use them to either avoid the failure or to make it certain, according to your attitude towards agile vim-adventures.com: Learning Vim keys in an entertaining way byContinue reading “Most interesting links of August ’12”

Tip: How to Easily Customize PMD Rules in Eclipse

The default PMD rules are little too strict for me (especially when starting on a legacy project) so I need to adjust them, usually by decreasing priority to warning. It’s however quite difficult to find the rule responsible for an error message unless you know how to do it. The answer is the PMD ViolationsContinue reading “Tip: How to Easily Customize PMD Rules in Eclipse”

Recommended Book: Real World Java EE Night Hacks by Adam Bien

Real World Java EE Night Hacks – Dissecting the Business Tier, Adam Bien, 2011, ISBN 9780557078325. I highly recommend this very thin and down-to-the-earth-practical book to everybody interested in back-end Java (a basic knowledge of servlets, Java ORM, and REST might be useful). The book evolves around a small but realistic project (X-Ray), which weContinue reading “Recommended Book: Real World Java EE Night Hacks by Adam Bien”

Minimalistic Practical Introduction to Puppet (Not Only) For Vagrant Users

I couldn’t find any good, brief, practical introduction into Puppet that gives you basic working knowledge in minimal time, so here it is. You will learn how to do the elementary things with Puppet – install packages, copy files, start services, execute commands. I won’t go into Puppet installation, nodes, etc. as this introduction focusesContinue reading “Minimalistic Practical Introduction to Puppet (Not Only) For Vagrant Users”

You’re Writing the Wrong Software – You Never Know What Users Want Until You Ask Them

Too often companies and IT departments believe that they know what software they should create. However users often need and want something different than you believe, even if you’re a domain expert yourself. My colleague and dear friend Ivar had exactly this experience when designing a meal planning tool for his girlfriend and himself. HeContinue reading “You’re Writing the Wrong Software – You Never Know What Users Want Until You Ask Them”

Zabbix: Fixing Active Checks to Work With Zabbix Proxy

We’ve recently changed our Zabbix 1.8.1 setup to include Zabbix Proxy, which broke all our active checks (f.ex. monitoring of log files). The solution seems to be having the proxy first, before the Zabbix Server, in the Zabbix Agent’s config parameter Server, i.e. “Server=<proxy ip>,<server ip>”.

How to Add MapRed-Only Node to Hadoop

I was surprised not to be able to google an answer to this so I want to record my findings here. To add (a.k.a. commision) a node to Hadoop cluster that should be used only for map-reduce tasks and not for storing data, you have multiple options: Do not start the datanode service on theContinue reading “How to Add MapRed-Only Node to Hadoop”